As Jews across Colorado draw together to celebrate Hanukkah, conversations once again turned to the slaughter of the innocent – this time at Bondi Beach near Sydney, Australia.

“We thought we were getting away from it, but then it comes back,” said Kevin Farrington, a 25-year FBI veteran who heads the Colorado team for Secure Community Network, a training and communications organization serving Jewish congregations and organizations in the wake of a run of antisemitic attacks.

Farrington and his team help prepare worshipers for the possibility of an attack. That has been a growing concern since the 2018 attack by a gunman who killed 11 worshipers at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and which hit a crescendo with the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of 1,200 civilians in Israel’s Negev region near Gaza.

Last June, the violence came home to Colorado. A Molotov cocktail attack by a lone assailant on marchers in Boulder, who were carrying on a weekly demonstration for the release of the remaining Gaza hostages, left one dead.

That event had been followed by a relative peace, reinforced by the October ceasefire in Gaza.

But the scope of the Bondi Beach killings by the alleged father-son attackers – reportedly inspired by radical Islamic ideology, leaving 15 victims dead and another 40 celebrants injured – has renewed the anguish in the Jewish community here in Colorado.

HORRIFIED AND HEARTBROKEN

“It’s devastating,” said Senior Rabbi Avraham Mintz of Chabad South Metro Denver in Greenwood Village and Lone Tree, who took time to speak with The Denver Gazette during a whirlwind of festival events that are being staged in part as a reaction to the shootings.

“We are horrified and heartbroken, but not shocked about the attack,” added Senior Rabbi Sarah Shulman at Denver’s Hebrew Educational Alliance, a south Denver congregation affiliated with Judaism’s conservative movement.

“Given the rampant antisemitism that festers throughout our world, to be shocked would be naïve,” she added. “It truly breaks my heart that a group of Jewish families who were gathered simply to light candles, eat donuts, and celebrate Hanukkah together would be gunned down so brutally by a father and son.”

Shulman noted, as many did, the heroism demonstrated by bystanders, including a Muslim fruit vendor who tackled one shooter and tore away his gun.

“I must have watched that video a dozen times,” Shulman added. “In a world in which Jews so often feel isolated and targeted, his actions, along with other acts of bravery at the scene, were an important reminder that we are not alone.”

Farrington, who stays in close contact with security teams at congregations and events, said that law enforcement has stepped up their level of awareness in the wake of the Australia killings.

“Communication is great; they’re doing everything they can.”

His staff, Farrington added, continues conducting safety planning with organizations’ staff and volunteers, while carrying out building assessments identifying safety risks.

“It’s very challenging. We’re trying to stay ahead of it,” he added.

Mintz said the Jewish Festival of Lights is the right venue to answer a terror attack, such as last Sunday’s.

“We’re a people of action,” he said. “We’re going to fight the darkness with light.” 

Mintz, who was enroute from a hospital to a senior center, said that he and his assistant rabbis and educational staff were working nonstop through the week, visiting nursing homes, carrying on a Hanukkah-on-Ice skating event for the congregation, and adding a holiday stopover to visit prisoners at a law enforcement detention center.

“We’re doing more events than ever,” Mintz added. “We’re going to light the darkness.”

Rabbi Joe Charnes, who serves the historic Temple Aaron congregation in Trinidad, reflected on the meaning of the festival, with its root in the second-century BC Maccabean Revolt, a period of captivity in Israel.

RIGHT OF SELF-EXPRESSION

“At this time, we’re remembering a war not for territorial expansion or for conversion, but for the right to self-expression, to be allowed to celebrate the landscape within,” he said.

Charnes said he was horrified not just by the attack, but in the failure of Australian leaders to read warning signs for the attack’s potential.

Coming into the holiday last weekend, Charnes and other worshipers hosted a celebration for police, firefighters and other first responders in their historic synagogue, which dates from 1883.

“Without the first responders, we wouldn’t have the freedom to live in relative freedom and security,” he said.

“We will not be victims,” added Shulman, noting that the Australian victims will be on her mind as she lights Hanukkah candles tonight. “We want to be lamplighters to ignite a world of goodness, love, and justice.”

The festival of Hanukkah ends Monday.